There are many “dead” men walking about who do not know they are dead.
An illustration of the logic of Judge O’Connor is best shown in the case of a man who had looked long and lovingly on the flowing bowl. He fell into a deep pit dug by workmen while fixing the bridge over the Mohawk River. Several policemen with ropes got the man out and he was arrested. Drunk and disorderly was the charge against him when he stood before Judge O’Connor somewhat sobered and chastened. “You were drunk last night,” said the court. “No, sir, your honor, I wasn’t drunk.” “Why, you must have been drunk,” said the court. “If you had not been, you would have been killed by that fall.” “Shure, I wazzent drunk,” persisted the culprit. “Then you are a dead man, so what are you doing here,” declared the judge; and the man, taking the hint, walked out somewhat amazed.
(677)
A marvelous thing for these times is reported from Weathersfield, Conn. A convict who has served a sentence of fifty years in the State prison receives his liberty at this Christmas season (1909). In 1859, when he was twenty-one, he murdered his wife, who was only a young girl of eighteen. He is seventy-one now. Every one of the great occurrences in American life which make our modern civilization what it is belongs to that half-century for which this man has been behind prison bars. Into what a changed world he will come. What can he do? His friends are dead. His generation has passed. His own State does not know him. One would suppose he would almost want to commit some crime that would take him back to his home of fifty years. What can he do? Society punished him, now what will society do for him? There is no asylum for him. He knows nothing of the business methods of the day. He is a living dead man. Would it not have been more merciful for society by capital punishment to have made him a dead man fifty years ago?
(678)
There is a very real “death” other than the merely natural, as the following paragraph from the Scrap Book will show:
Emperor Francis Joseph’s only surviving brother, Archduke Louis Victor, was confined a lunatic, in a mountain castle hidden away in one of the remotest corners of the Austrian Tyrol. He himself, to all intents, is dead as far as the imperial family and the great world at Vienna are concerned. (Text.)
(679)